In 480 B.C., after the Battle at Thermopylae, huge Persian military forces occupied Boeotia and were planning  to  continue  towards  the Peloponnese.  In order for the Greeks to stop the Persians from advancing any further, they decided to face the enemy fleet in the narrow sea straits of Salamis where the great numerical superiority of the Persians would not count. The naval battle that followed resulted in the destruction of hundreds of Persian ships, this forced Xerxes to return to Asia, immediately afterwards the Greeks counterattacked, and during the following year they succeeded in expelling the Persians from the Balkan Peninsula. It is generally considered that the victory of the Greeks in the Battle of Salamis prevented the Persian Empire from occupying Greece and permitted the flowering of the Golden Era of Athens, which has influenced Western European civilization to this day.

The painting completed in 1882 and constitutes a large, ambitious composition, combining the effort to be historically exact with the search for artistic representation. It belongs to the Hellenic Navy General Staff, and it decorated the Prime Minister’s Office until 2022.